Sacred Cows You Hope Die?


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Clerics as Crusading Warriors. "Barbarian" as an occupation. Halflings as a core race. Inflexible Vancian magic.
 

  • Racial level limits/XP penalties/favored class: Stop forcing archetypes down our throats.
  • Vancian magic: If we're gonna borrow from videogames, let's borrow the mana points!
  • Half-elves as a race: It looks like this cow shall remain sacred. :\
  • Mandatory material components for most spells: I'd rather see power components that beef up spells, but are not required.
  • Useless familiars.
 

For me, it's get rid of the cleric and paladin being in the same book or change one or the other's roles tremendously. A LG cleric and a paladin could be brothers!
 



Per Rest Period mechanics. I'm not going to call them 'per day,' because the typical PC's workday is about 10 minutes long. It's not the Vancian magic I mind, so much, it's the fight-rest-fight cycle and the assumption of attrition. Vance's spellcasters needed have time to re-memorize their (very few and very powerful) spells, and they were limited by the time and concentration that took and often the lack of portability of their spells - not by 'days,' by which I mean how often they got a good night's sleep. Also, they didn't completely suck when out of spells.

Armor Class and Saves. Saga's Defenses system has completely soured me on these being separate concepts. At least this is really easy to houserule.

Alignment as a mechanic in its current form. Pretty obvious, I think.

Mechanics for enforcing a particular class/race combination, aside from making characters of certain races mechanically well suited for certain classes. Dwarven wizards being more sensible than elven wizards in 3e being a glaring example of the inverse.

A dichotomy between 'PC races' and 'monster races' based on which ones were in the Fellowship of the Ring. Obvious.

Magic item dependency. A relatively young sacred cow, but already ripe for the slaughter. Make magic items magical and RARE and COOL, not +x to y required to not die.

Gameplay death and resurrection as default assumptions. My Gamist side doesn't need them to feel challenged, and they sure as heck don't represent the source material. Death should be dramatic, death should be either agreed upon or due to resource expenditure, and death should be FINAL except for artifacts.

Spell levels. I'd rather they be CALLED something different, but either remove them or make them synch up with character levels.

The Great Wheel and the Planescape outsiders. These are fine - for the Planescape Campaign Setting release in 2010 or 2011. In the meantime, give me more generically useful demons (console RPG style weird ancient evils) and devils (medieval style sinister manipulative hellspawn) and angels (holy, radiant beings of light).
 

Didn't think about that, but yeah, the terminology of the game could use a good polishing to remove multiple instances of the same word for different meanings.
 


Eventually?

Classes as we have them now - use True20-like archetypical classes and build from there via feat/talent trees. Classes are useful as a shortcut, but simpy reduce them to their most basic application of role/niche protection.

Spells - Hopefully some of the things we're seeing hinted at mean that a significant rework of the entire spell system has been done. Otherwise, have a simple template + effect system. I cast a Lightning of Thor! (Ranged damaging spell with the electricity and holy template). Not quite the power system of True20, not quite the spells we have now but something inbetween.

Armor Class - Defense ratings per class based on level. The warrior guy wearing a loincloth should always be a valid character.

Hit Points - Simpler damage track that combines status/condition changes with something that indicates loss of life, like Wound points. Whateve, something simpler to track than hit points.
 

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